Give our NetCrunch network monitoring suite a try. We run on Windows, and can not only e-mail or SMS you when a service goes down, but we can also restart it for you automatically.

Say your service goes down. NetCrunch can restart it automatically. After five minutes, if it's still down we can reboot the machine. 5 minutes later if it's still down, then we can notify you however you'd like.

The easiest way would be to use PRTG. It already has around 40 built-in sensors for Windows machines, including sensors to check that a service is running and to restart the service if it's not running. Absolutely no scripting needed! (Of course, if you'd like to try scripting other things later, it's very easy to add custom scripts to PRTG too, but that can come later.)

You can get alerts by email, SMS, push notification, and lots of other methods. When a service has stopped, PRTG will try to restart it. You can then define custom levels of escalation that should happen. For example, try a restart and send an informational email that you're restarting. Then, if the service is still down 2 minutes later, reboot the machine and send an informational SMS that you're rebooting. And, after 5 minutes, if the service is still down, open a ticket to your help desk. Or if all of that is too complicated, stick with the basics: let PRTG attempt to restart the service automatically (without sending an alert) and then send only one alert if the restart fails.

We offer a free 30-day trial version with full functionality and an unlimited number of sensors. After the 30 days it will automatically revert to our freeware version with 100 sensors (free forever). PRTG runs on any Windows version (even on Windows clients) and can monitor any Windows version.

To give you an idea of what it could look like in your environment, here's a screenshot of one of the sensors that can monitor a Windows service: